The Hidden Power of Speaking in Tongues
The Hidden Power of the Blood of Jesus
The Hidden Power of Healing Prayer
The Hidden Power of a Woman
The Hidden Power of Prayer and Fasting
The Hidden Power of Watching and Praying
40 Days of Prayer and Fasting

On the eve of the Normandy invasion, 760 paratroopers from the
3rd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry prepared to board
planes and be dropped behind enemy lines. They and thousands of
other champions would soon launch one of the most strategic assaults of World War II. Anticipation and solemn courage settled over
the orchard where the paratroopers stood. Lieutenant Colonel
Wolverton asked them to kneel with him in prayer:
“Do not bow your heads,” Lt. Col. Wolverton said, “but look up
so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we’re about to do.”
Those paratroopers and the countless heroes like them turned
the tide of the war. The paratroopers’ posture, face up in expectation as they prayed, is the spiritual posture of the watchman
awake in prayer. This book is dedicated to the company of champions who have been watching and praying together since The
Watch of the Lord™ began. We invite you to join with us and discover The Hidden Power of Watching and Praying.

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THE MODEL PRAYER

Our Father in heaven,
Reveal who You are.
Set the world right;
Do what’s best—as above, so below.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with You and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.
You’re in charge!
You can do anything You want!
You’re ablaze in beauty!
Yes. Yes. Yes.
(Matthew 6:9-13 TM)

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CONTENTS

Introduction: The Way You Do ......................11
Chapter 1

Reveal Who You Are
Our Father in Heaven ....................................19

Chapter 2

Holy!
Hallowed Be Your Name ................................35

Chapter 3

Set the World Right
Your Kingdom Come ......................................47

Chapter 4

Do Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Best
Your Will Be Done ..........................................69

Chapter 5

As Above, So Below
On Earth As It Is in Heaven ............................91

Chapter 6

Alive With Three Square Meals
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread................111

During the week of our daughter Anna’s college final exams,
late one evening I (Mahesh) was in my study when an urge to pray
came over me strongly. Not fully understanding what this burden
of prayer was about, I began to pray in the Spirit.1
For nearly three hours, I remained in this state of prayer, at
one point kneeling beside the couch where I had been sitting.
Eventually the urge to pray lifted as it had come. As I went off to
bed, I passed by the room where Anna was still up studying. Poking my head in the door, having given no specific thought to what
I was about to say, I told her, “Instead of taking my car to school
tomorrow as you usually do, take your mother’s Jeep.” Momentarily interrupted, Anna looked up from her books and nodded.
I repeated this command twice more, until Anna rolled her
eyes and said, “OK Dad, I promise.”
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The next morning, our house phone began to ring just before 8
o’clock. When Bonnie answered the phone, the caller informed
us that Anna had been involved in a terrible car accident just beyond our neighborhood. We rushed to the scene of the crash.
When we got there, the air was still filled with a white cloud
from the air bags, which had deployed. At the scene, patrolmen,
two fire engine details, and an EMS unit were working. The front
of Bonnie’s Jeep was wrapped around a tree in a shallow ravine
just beyond a hairpin turn in the road. An early rain had left the
road surfaces slippery and, blinded by the morning sun, Anna
had lost control of the vehicle. Skidding off the road, she had hit
the tree head-on at approximately 35 miles per hour. The vehicle
was totaled and Anna was pinned inside.
As the EMS team worked to extract our daughter from the vehicle, all involved were certain that our daughter was surely dead or
dying. Bonnie ran to the open door just as the emergency team lifted
Anna out. She was alive, although both of her legs were broken. The
officials on the scene kept repeating, “It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle
your daughter is alive.” A career patrolman and experienced fire
rescue and EMS personnel all told us this was the first of such accidents they had ever seen where the person in the car was not instantly killed. “Those airbags,” they said. “The airbags saved her.”
The first miracle in this testimony is the miracle of being
awakened to prayer. The urge to pray that came on me the night
before the accident was a prophetic breath from our Father in
Heaven, who neither slumbers nor sleeps. He was watching over
Anna. As I prayed in the Spirit, I had been breathing out the will
of the Father to save Anna’s life during the events that were to
occur the next morning.
The second miracle was the instruction that I gave to Anna,
which came as a result of my long prayer, the insistent instruction
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Introduction

to take her mother’s car instead of mine as she usually did. (My
vehicle did not have airbags.)
The third and greatest miracle was the result of the first two.
Our daughter is alive and well today.
This is a story of watching in prayer. The thief who comes to
steal, kill, and destroy must pass by the house where watch lamps
are brightly burning. One alert watchman can save an entire
house. This is why Paul wrote to the Thessalonian church, “pray
without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).
In the life of Jesus, we can see an example of how a person becomes prayer and is able to “pray without ceasing.” Going about
His daily routine, Jesus suddenly began to pray:
Abruptly Jesus broke into prayer: “Thank You, Father,
Lord of heaven and earth. You’ve concealed Your ways
from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out
clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that’s the way You
like to work” (Matthew 11:25-26 TM).
Jesus was a watchman. He drew His closest friends into that
circle of prayer. They drew in many more, as believers were
added to the Church. That praying Church turned the world’s
culture on its ear.
We have been privileged to live a life watching in prayer.
Watching in prayer is the nuclear weapon of the Church in any
age, particularly if two or more are gathered in His name. We
have seen the hidden power of watching in prayer to bring the
Kingdom of God on earth thousands of times over in deliverances,
in healings, in reconciliation, in restoration of individuals, families, churches, nations.
The earliest prayer posture of Christianity—face-up in expectation—reflects the attitude of an awakened spirit. Prayer “without
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ceasing” is not limited to prayer on one’s knees or even to prayer
with eyes closed reverentially. In fact, “watching in prayer” implies
open eyes and an alert spirit. It can happen wherever a believer
finds himself or herself, and it is particularly powerful when the person is not isolated from others.
The model prayer of Jesus, traditionally called the “Our Father” or “The Lord’s Prayer,” is a perfect summary of the most important aspects of watchful prayer. Far more than a few rote
phrases to be repeated in a singsong religious fashion, this simple
prayer of Jesus is the spinal column of all spiritual revelation,
foundational to the prayers of every believer.
The men who went about with Jesus did not always fully grasp
what they observed in His life. Jesus’ prayer life was revolutionary. Christ’s disciples had come from a 3000-year-old tradition of
prayer and Jesus did too. Yet there was something different about
the way Jesus prayed. When they saw it, His friends said, “Teach
us to pray the way You do!” So He gave them the model prayer.
One of history’s most powerful prayer warriors, Teresa of
Avila, proposed that praying the “Our Father” with revelation
knowledge and personal experience of God would be sufficient to
raise a Christian to the heights of prayer intended by God.2 It is
with this in mind we have written this book with our prayers that
you will become an effective watchman for your world, bringing
down Heaven to earth through your prayers.
What was different about Jesus’ prayers? His prayer began in
Heaven with His Father. Jesus Christ became our intercessor before
intervention was necessary! He lives on, interceding for you and me
today (see Romans 8:34). He is always joined with the Father.
The One who neither slumbers nor sleeps is always looking
for men and women who count sheep and are willing to watch
over His flocks by day and night. At the beginning of time, God
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Introduction

intervened and said, “Let there be light!” At the end of time,
Christ shall intervene when He comes to set the world right. In
between these two events, there hangs a great suspension bridge
over which the watchmen of God walk with Him in prayer. This
bridge connects Heaven and earth. Believers who are awake to
watch and pray pass between the two realms, harmonizing with
God in His desires for earth.
In the context of fulfilling his call as a watchman, Jeremiah
speaks of the justice of God’s judgment:
Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem; see now and
know; and seek in her open places if you can find a man, if
there is anyone who executes judgment, who seeks the truth,
and I will pardon her [Jerusalem] (Jeremiah 5:1).
Eyes wide open to the crises of his generation, the prophet
also had spirit-eyes through which he discerned God’s readiness
to intervene if He could find someone who was awake and in harmony with His will.
As with the story of our daughter Anna, prayer begins to create the solution before the problem exists. Prayer arrives on the
scene, already intervening as the problem unfolds. Prayer remains behind after the crisis is over to pick up the pieces and to
recreate what has been destroyed. Prayer revitalizes the wasted
land and brings forth a seed-bearing garden. By watching in
prayer, light is sown in darkness, the foundations are reestablished, and the pleasure of God is fulfilled. Prayer never ceases.
It continues, in season and out, anticipating, observing, plowing,
sowing, reaping, fertilizing, watering, and rejoicing.
Living our lives with eyes open for God is what watching in
prayer is all about. This is the striking difference in Jesus’ prayer
life. Prayer is being in harmony with our Father in Heaven and
allowing Him to make us a vessel of His will on earth. Watching
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in prayer is developing a posture of militant vigilance with a spirit
fully awakened to God. It is not so much doing something different as it is being different in prayer.
As we began to put this book on paper, we were blessed to
spend a few days in retreat on the lake home of dear friends. The
first morning we watched from the deck as a man took his son out
into the lake to teach him to swim. After splashing about a bit, the
man slid onto his back and said to the boy, “You see? It’s just like
lying on the couch.” Although there was nothing to support his
body from falling into the depths, the boy so trusted his father, almost immediately he was imitating him, swimming back and forth
and happily “lying on the couch” in between. The boy did not become someone else in order to swim and float. As he watched his
father, he imitated him.
Like the man on the lake, there is a way for us to rest, to float,
as we watch in prayer. We learn not to succumb to the elements of
chaos in our lives or to the darkness in our generation. As we
learn to watch with Jesus, we learn to succumb to the rhythms of
God. We learn by watching Jesus watch the Father. Jesus watched
in prayer when He walked the earth, and He still watches in
prayer. He wants us to join Him.
Jürgen Moltmann wrote: “Prayer never stands by itself. It is
always bound up with watching,…which goes with true praying,
and to which true prayer is supposed to lead us. Praying is good,
but watching is better.”3
As a soldier in Hitler’s army during World War II Moltmann
witnessed terrible things. He surrendered to the first British soldier that came along. During his internment as a prisoner of war,
he met Christians who so impacted him that he committed his life
to Christ. “What else is Christian spirituality except watching
and praying, watching prayerfully and praying watchfully?” he
wrote. “Strong men often think that praying is something for old
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women who have nothing left to them but the rosary or the hymnbook. It has become rather unknown that praying has to do with
awakening, watching, attention, and the expectation of life.”4
As Moltmann observed:
Christian faith is not blind faith. It is the wakeful expectation of God, which touches all the senses. The early
Christians prayed standing up, looking up, with arms
outstretched and eyes wide open, ready to walk or to leap
forward. Their prayer posture reflects tense expectation,
not quiet heart searching. “We do not watch just because
of the dangers that threaten us. We are expecting the salvation of the world. We are watching for God’s advent. With
tense attention, we open all our senses for the coming of
God into our lives, into our society, to this earth.”5
The Watchman of the Father is brooding over His nest to create a dwelling place for God. He is walking in the garden of His
creation. He is praying in Gethsemane. He is looking for His
friends and calling them to come. He is saying, “Collect your faculties. Rise up from sitting and lying down. Come! Be vigilant
with Me!” Christ told his disciples, “What I say to you, I say to
all: Watch!” (Mark 13:37).
We are face-up in expectation, getting ourselves and our
world ready for His appearing as we discover the power of watching in prayer. And we invite you to watch with us!

ENDNOTES
1. See First Corinthians 12-14 and Mahesh Chavda, The
Hidden Power of Speaking in Tongues (Shippensburg,
PA: Destiny Image, 2003).
2. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection.
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THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER,
FOUNDATION FOR ALL PRAYER.
“Finis origine pendet,” the Roman poet Manlius wrote. “The
end depends on the beginning.”
The beginning of our watching in prayer began many years
ago. During the charismatic renewal of the 1970s, it became our
custom to forego regular periods of sleep for the sake of prayer.
Coupled with fasting at times, we joined together with friends in
private homes for times of worship, prayer, and Bible teaching.
This lifestyle flowed into our church life as we took up our first
pastorate, and has continued in every place and in every season
for more than three decades.
In 1994, we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and a visitation of renewal poured out in our home. We gathered a few friends
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to fellowship and pray together on Friday nights. The Lord said to
us, “Watch with Me,” and The Watch of the Lord was born.
In those days I (Mahesh) received a vision which recurred
three times over three weeks. In the vision I saw huge feet in the
midst of the room. When I asked the Lord, “What does it mean?”
I got no answer, just big feet. The next week, I got the same vision
again, except this time the feet were surrounded by clouds. The
third week, the vision came, and this time I saw that the clouds
around the feet were filled with golden glory, lightning, love,
blessings, and power. The clouds parted for a moment, and I saw
that the feet were scarred by nail prints. Immediately the Holy
Spirit spoke to me: “Go to Ruth, chapter 3. My voice is the voice
of Naomi.” Here’s what I found.
In the book of Ruth, Jewish Naomi instructs her Gentile
daughter-in-law:
Wash and perfume yourself, and put on your best clothes.
Then go down to the threshing floor, but don’t let [Boaz]
know you are there until he has finished eating and
drinking. When he lies down, note the place where he is
lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will
tell you what to do (Ruth 3:3-4 NIV).
From this, we realized that watching is a bridal relationship.
It’s an intimate thing. It is like coming to “uncover the feet of the
Lord” and then waiting for Him to tell us what to do. The Holy
Spirit is directing us to spend the night at Jesus’ feet. Just like
Boaz did, as we come to watch and pray, Jesus takes us under His
wing, protecting us, rejoicing that we have chosen to follow the
voice of His Spirit over the other pulls and distractions of the
world. We come to the threshing floor where He winnows us, purifying us to be His spotless Bride. We come to set aside our own
agendas and needs to avail ourselves to His agenda and purpose
in this hour. Just as Naomi told Ruth, “He will tell you what to
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do,” as we come into His presence, we are assured that He will
tell us what to do. This is the key that sets apart watching prayer
from some of our previous misconceptions of intercession.
Watching is the art of being in God’s presence, enjoying Him,
worshiping Him, and listening for His instruction. It is in that place
of being in relationship that He will instruct us. He leads by the
Holy Spirit and provides insight, instruction, and direction regarding His plans and strategies in battle. When He directs, we bind the
enemy, we pray for healing and deliverance and we anoint people
with oil, and we find that He is willing to do all that we ask.
So we gathered a few believers and began to stay up all night,
every week on Friday night, watching in prayer. We had some
amazing healings of cancer and diabetes and terminal conditions
right from the beginning. The presence of the Lord was so thick
that people would come from across the country in buses to join
us in prayer and worship.
We have kept watching in prayer for over fourteen years straight
now, every Friday night. The Bridegroom of Heaven is listening to
our requests, and we have seen Him intervene in national and international events, and in our personal and family lives. He has been
telling us what to do as we have been keeping The Watch together.
When Ruth left in the morning, Boaz heaped her shawl full of
grain. We have found that the same happens for us when we come
to lie at the feet of our Kinsman-Redeemer, Jesus. As the morning
light begins to break, we find that He has filled us with His blessings as we have spent the night at His feet.

BEGINNING TO WATCH
Where do we begin in our approach to watching in prayer?
Jesus began teaching His disciples to pray with these words:
“Our Father in Heaven.”
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Prayer is difficult for many because they have never appropriated the truths of God’s fatherhood. The God to whom we pray is Father. Genuine Christian prayer begins with the realization that when
we receive Christ we are born into the most remarkable family imaginable. We become the sons and daughters of the Father, brothers
and sisters of Jesus Christ, welcomed into oneness with the Holy
Spirit. Knowing God as Father is the key to Christian prayer.
This knowledge enables us to become fully human, because
the essence of humanness is relationship. Relationship indicates
there is a community to which we are related. (We will explore the
joys and values of sharing in ongoing community of prayer in
Chapter 3.)
There are as many ideas of who God is as there are world religions, but Christianity is not just another world religion. Christian faith is a living, personal relationship made real through the
mystery of the working of the Holy Spirit. No other prophet, guru,
potentate, angel, or visitor from an alien planet has made such a
bold claim as Jesus has. The Father has taken the initiative to
send His Son to become our elder brother who paves our way
back home. No salvation offered by any other self-proclaimed
spokesman for God is remotely similar. Mohammed claims Allah
has no sons and no companions, nor has any need of them. Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, and the hosts of other figures who
have claimed to have the truth about God are all dead. None of
them claimed to be a sin offering in exchange for our sins. Few of
them even gave hope that some kind of salvation was possible.
Those who did laid a heavy burden of religious regulations on
their followers.
All of the figures down through history claiming to reveal God
to man also confessed that they had failed to keep the very religions they invented. All of their “gods” stand at a distance behind a veil of obscurity, threatening or being threatened. None of
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them claimed that the ultimate revelation of God is as our Father
who loves us on a personal and intimate level.
Only Jesus said, “I have come to give you life abundantly.”
Not only did Jesus completely keep the commands He gave to
others, but also, after His resurrection, He showed Himself to
over five hundred people. They touched His side and hands, ate
the food He cooked for them, talked with Him, received His instructions for the future, saw His glory, and stood watching as He
went up and disappeared into Heaven with a joyful promise of
returning in like manner. He said, “I am going to the Father to
prepare a place for you so that where I AM you may be, too!”
(See John 14:2-3.)
In one of the earliest accounts of a man inquiring who God is,
Moses asked, “Who shall I say has sent me?” God replied: “Tell
them I AM that I AM has sent you.”1 Jesus asked His disciples,
“Who do men say that I AM?” The men gave a variety of answers.
Then He asked, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You
are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Jesus answered,
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah for flesh and blood has not
revealed this to you but My Father who is in Heaven. And upon
this rock I will build My church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (see Matt.16:13-18).
Jesus is the Son of the Father. He is the exact representation
and image of the One who created your world. When Jesus takes
your hand, He leads you straight to the Father. You find yourself
planted on an immovable foundation of truth from which all other
truth flows. No power can stand against this truth.
Human nature seems most comfortable in keeping God at a
distance. People tend to fear or squirm or curse or run if He
seems to get too close to home or too near the heart. God is much
less threatening if He is an impersonal “higher power” rather
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than the One to whom we give a relational account for ourselves
and our lives.
The earliest account of a name being assigned to this I AM
God is in the words to a man who came to be known as the father
of faith. “Do not fear, Abram, I AM your Shield, your exceedingly
great reward!” (See Genesis 15:1.) A shield? The Hebrew shield
or magen is a personal buckler used to defend one’s torso during
hand-to-hand combat with an enemy. Magen was also used as a
word for “king” in a context where every city had a god-king; and
every one of those god-kings was struggling to become the chief
over all other kings in the territory. When Abraham came into the
land that God had promised him there would be five territorial
kings he would have to defeat. But God said, “Don’t worry…I AM
King and will give this land over to you and your sons.” Abraham
laid aside the name and the inheritance his earthly father would
have allotted him. He chose to obey the voice of Father God.
Moses, too, refused the name and inheritance due him as a son of
Pharaoh, choosing the name and inheritance as a son of Abraham. Abraham and Moses believed in I AM of the Bible.

Coming Home
What if this God of the Bible is who He says? What does that
mean for us? How do I relate to Him? Does He have a plan for my
life? Is it a good plan? Does He have a plan for the world? Do I fit
into His plan? Who is ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’? Who
is the God who made the worlds, told Noah to build an ark, parted
the Red Sea, made David sing, filled the ancient temple with the
glory, spoke through the prophets, chose Israel as His own possession, and became the Man who went to Calvary? Who is I AM?
Jesus began to reveal Himself to me (Bonnie) when I was
nineteen years old. At a certain point, I lay down the identity of
my father’s proud heritage to follow Jesus. But within weeks of a
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powerful renewal experience, dark shadows from the world began
to torment me. I knew my natural father could not help. A friend
invited me to attend a prayer meeting in a fellow Christian’s
home, one of the many midweek renewal meetings happening
across the nation during the days of the charismatic outpouring.
With the exception of the friend, I did not know any of the other
people who would be attending that night.
When I walked through the door, I was overcome by an intense
atmosphere of a very real God. It was as though His Person hung in
molecules filling up the air. Although I could not see Him with my
physical eyes, my heart embraced Him and shouted, “I’m home at
last!” The perfect strangers in the room were suddenly closer than
natural family members who did not know Christ.
As I encountered the pure presence of God, He adopted me.
Although I had more or less grown up in church and had a “salvation moment” as a child, I had gone my own way for my teen years
and had never before felt the love of my heavenly Father. Over
the next few weeks I launched upon a spiritual journey in God
that has become a lifetime of adventure, being baptized in the
Holy Spirit and powerfully delivered. This is what it means to receive the spirit of adoption.

A Story of Return
Without intimacy with God as Father, a person may seek himself in all sorts of things. Some search for “fulfillment,” craving
affirmation or pleasure. Some are just looking to survive. But
everyone who is searching for something is actually looking for
someone—the Father who made us in His image. The prodigal
son left his father and found himself the slave of a cruel master
(see Luke 15). In our search for identity, the prince of this world
(the devil) will send each of us “into his fields to feed swine.” The
best day of the lost boy’s life was the day he woke up in a pigsty
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starving for something real. In the shadows of his searching, God
was lurking—just as He still does today. He is calling us as he
did to Adam: “Where are you?” No more hiding. There are great
dreams to be dreamed, adventures to be lived, battles to be won
and lives to be saved.
The prodigal son was no orphan but when he went away from
his father, he was existing as if he were a hired hand. Many of us
have already gone down this road into the far country, believing
the world’s systems offer us something that we want. But only if
we return to our Father can we find the One who can satisfy.
Don’t waste your inheritance; don’t disdain the table that God
has spread for you. Whether you are in the Kingdom or out of it,
whether you are backslidden or fully walking with the Lord, there
is more at the Father’s table than you have had so far. God has
made this day for you that He may reveal who He is. Like the
prodigal’s father, our Father is still watching and waiting.
When we find our way back, we are able to turn to help out in
the Father-directed search for our missing family members. We
seek them in prayer. We seek them in love. We watch with expectancy from day to day, ready to celebrate their return.
It’s simple, really. To whom do you pray? There are streams of
healing, of deliverance, of reconciliation and revelation, of hope,
peace, contentment, security, and fearlessness that come in the
revelation of God as our Father. In Christ we are no longer just
servants, no longer merely acquaintances, no longer lowly slaves,
no longer only ministers, no longer just ambassadors. Through
the blood of Christ, we come home. The Great Architect has designed a luxury home for Himself by making human beings in His
image. His ultimate residence is within the human heart. The
human spirit is the Holy of Holies. It is God’s desired resting
place. The Shekinah glory that lifted from the temple in the days
of Ezekiel was silent after Malachi prophesied, never appearing
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again until the day of Pentecost. He is returning to His dwelling
place in you, in me, in us. When you are able to embrace God as
your Father, the gates of hell cannot prevail against you.
Jesus refers to God more than a hundred times in the
Gospels. Fewer than half a dozen of those references to God are
as anything other than “Father.” Jesus calls God “My heavenly
Father,” “My Father,” “your Father,” “your heavenly Father,”
“the Father,” and “the heavenly Father.” Today, allow Him to
fully embrace you as your Father, and in return fully embrace
Him back as a son or daughter, no longer considering yourself
an unworthy hired servant.
Each of us has been made worthy of God’s embrace and inheritance because of Christ the Son. On the Cross, Jesus “became
sin for us.” You died. I died. And then we rose up to new life
again. When we say, “God so loved the world that He gave His
only begotten Son,” it’s the same as when the father said to his
servants, “Bring out the best robe and put it on him and put a ring
on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here
and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead
and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (John 3:16 and Luke
15:22-24). In the present-day revival of prayer, the feasting has
begun. Pull your chair up and eat to your heart’s content from the
banquet table. Taste and see how good God really is!
“For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to
fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we
cry out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8:15).

Receiving the Spirit of Adoption
Just before I (Mahesh) turned five years old, my father died,
essentially leaving me not only fatherless, but with very little living knowledge of my father.
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When I was sixteen years old, all that changed. A Baptist missionary knocked on our door one day and asked for a drink of
water. In return for that glass of water, she gave me a New Testament. I had been raised in a family of aristocratic Hindu tradition
with a long written family history. For eight hundred years, my
family had been defenders of the Hindu faith. But I was also a
lover of truth.
Being an avid reader, I spent the next few nights reading this
book. It was an interesting book, not like any I had ever read before. It seemed as if, while I read it, the Author was looking over
my shoulder and reading me. After two or three nights of this, I
began to come to a crisis in my identity, because I realized that
everything this book was about was against my natural, cultural,
and religious heritage. I made a decision that I wasn’t going to
read that book anymore.
That night, however, I suddenly fell into a trance-like sleep at
my little reading table, and my consciousness was taken to a place
and a realm that I had never before visited. I found myself in a place
that was more real than anything I had ever experienced. The streets
were of gold, the atmosphere was filled with singing, and vibrant
colors and zillions of beams of light were dancing all around. The
light was alive and so full of joy that my entire being was in ecstasy,
filled with the atmosphere of Heaven. Every beam of light was
singing to me and every beam of light had a variation of one theme:
“I love you; I love you; I love you. I have always loved you; I’ll always love you; I died for you before you ever knew Me, for I always
loved you. I love you; I will always love you.”
And then I saw the source of light coming toward me. The
light was a Person. I knew immediately that it was Jesus. I looked
into Jesus’ eyes and saw the fire of His love. I saw eyes that had
shed every tear and that knew every joy. And then the One whom
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I knew loved me most in the universe came and put His hand
right on my shoulder and said, “My little brother.”
When I woke up, the Bible was turned to a place I had not remembered reading. It was open at the story of a rich young ruler
who came to Jesus one day, asking what he could do to inherit
eternal life. When Jesus gave him the answer, it says that the
young man went away very sorrowful, because he was unwilling to
make that exchange.
What must a man do to inherit eternal life? He must get to
know the Father. How does he get to know Him? By receiving the
Son. I did it. I became Jesus’ newest brother, the newest adopted
son of our Father, and I knew He would never die or leave me.
If your Father were the King, the president, the Supreme Court
judge, the greatest defense attorney, the Olympic champion, the
world-class artist, the brain surgeon, the greatest philosopher, the
greatest business man, the richest man in the world—these things
would be your heritage. You would have personal access to the best
of every realm because the One who is your Father is also all of
those things to the world. This is what you possess once you come to
Christ and God becomes your Father.
We who have received Christ have received the Father. As we
have His Spirit we also receive His heart and with it deliverance
from the world through the very body and blood of Christ. We discern between the holy and the unholy. We rejoice in our new
identity. This is not worldly wisdom. We are holding onto God
Himself, and we are holding to a system of values as ancient as
the Ancient of Days Himself, one that supersedes contemporary
cultural fads and popular societal trends.
As we lean on God, there will also be a mutual leaning upon
one another, elder generations leaning upon the faithful young for
their zeal, talent, fresh insight, and support and the young leaning
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upon their elders for their foundational, experiential wisdom and
tested knowledge of God and His ways.

Letting Him Nurture You
Once you have received the spirit of adoption and you recognize
God as your Father, you will be willing to receive His correction.
Correction is a blessing. We have a heavenly Father as we have
earthly fathers. We have spiritual fathers as we have natural ones.
Paul compares his role as an apostle to the role filled by a father: “For though you might have ten thousand instructors in
Christ, yet you do not have many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have
begotten you through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4:15).
We live in a somewhat dysfunctional culture, but our children
prosper under the covering of the Church. There may not be natural fathers in every family but the Spirit-filled church that takes
prayer and covering seriously is a great blessing. As you benefit
from the covering of the Church, be thankful. The Church is the
Father’s house.
Jesus’ mission to earth is to reveal the Father. At one point some
of the men who followed Jesus said, “Show us the father and that
will be sufficient.” He replied, “If you have seen Me you have seen
the Father.” (See John 14:8-9.) If you want to see the face of God,
turn the eyes of your heart on Jesus. When a person lays hold of this
revelation of God as Father everything else falls in place.
This is the foundation of watching in prayer. It’s where we
begin our journey. Adam and Eve lost their way early when they
went their own way, breaking God’s command. The memory of
God was soon lost, too. In every generation, more and more people grew farther and farther away from the knowledge of who God
really is. Then they began to invent their own versions of God and
make religions around their inventions. But God remained true.
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The way home has been opened through the sacrifice made on
Calvary. Jesus ploughed the road back to the Father when he took
the cat-o’-nine-tails on his back. He opened the road with His
blood. We pray our way home with an awakened spirit, watching
in prayer with our Father. As we return to unbroken fellowship
with Him, He raises us as His own sons and daughters. And so we
see how Jesus was able to say, “In that day you will ask Me
(Jesus) nothing, most certainly I tell you whatever you ask the Father in My name…He will do it!” (See John 16:23.)
And so we pray, “Our Father, reveal who You are.”